I love presenting at user group meetings.  I can’t get enough of it.  If I could do it every day, I would.  I’ve got dozens of presentations I can use, and I’m continuously refining them based on attendee feedback.  I love helping people get more out of their servers and advance their careers.

There’s a few things that limit how often I can present, though.

Travel requires a lot of downtime. When I have to fly to another city, that means at least 4 hours of downtime to get there, and 4 hours to get back.  (Pack, subway, airport security, boarding, flight, taxi, etc.)  That’s a day of downtime, plus the time I spend at the user group, and during those travel windows, I can’t usually be as productive as I would be back in my home office.  If I have to take multiple flights because I can’t get there in one cheap flight from Chicago, my downtime skyrockets.

Travel is expensive. User group meetings are usually in the evenings, so I can’t fly straight back home afterwards.  That means I have to get dinner, a hotel, and breakfast the next morning.  Presenting at a user group costs around $300-$400, and that’s before I get other Quest people involved.  See, if I’m going to take the time and money to present, then Quest probably wants to have a salesperson in the room to handle questions afterwards, and the salesperson costs money too.  Hopefully we’ll make a sale in order to pay for all that expense, but it’s a gamble, and that gamble has to be chosen by the sales staff.  They decide where they want to invest their travel budgets.

Multi-city travel is risky and it sucks. I can mitigate the downtime & expense of travel by stringing together several cities in a row, but that is daaaangerous.  Read through my post on The Glamour of International Travel to see just how wrong it can go.  In one trip, I lost a bag, broke a laptop, and ran out of clean clothes.  All it takes is one delay or goof, and suddenly the whole trip is in jeopardy.  I love you guys, but I abhor going on these multi-hop trips.

Doghouses are uncomfortable. When I was young and single, working for a hotel company, I lived on the road full time.  Those days are over.  I’ve committed to Erika that I won’t average more than one week per month of travel.  For reasons I cannot comprehend, she seems to enjoy my company.  She can’t take off and travel along with me because she’s got a job.  When she takes vacations, we want to go somewhere that I don’t have to work at all.

I could avoid the travel hassles altogether if I could present remotely, but…

User groups don’t like remote presenters. The presentation experience is better when there’s an actual person in the room rather than just a talking head on a projector.  I totally understand where they’re coming from.  User group leaders have been spoiled for the last decade or so when vendors were throwing tons of money at travel, but as companies slowed down their software spending, that makes it harder to justify travel expenses.

User groups don’t have a lot of attendees. Some user groups can bring in 100 people, and that’s awesome, but most of the time it’s closer to 10-30 people.  Regional events like SQLSaturdays and SQLBits can bring in hundreds of people at once.  The more attendees I can reach, the easier it is to justify the travel money.

Help Me Help You

If you want to get out-of-town speakers at your local user group, there’s a few steps you can take to increase your odds of success.

Work with other area user groups. Coordinate schedules with .NET and SharePoint user groups within driving distance.  If you can work together to set up several meetings in a row, one night after another, all within driving distance, there’s a much higher likelihood that we can make it happen.  That opens up the possibility of me and a salesperson doing a one-week road trip and covering several groups in a row.

Schedule a regional event with vendor sessions. Set up a SQLSaturday and get the vendor to sponsor it.  Let the vendor have a lunch session – a meeting room where they can bring in a speaker to talk for an hour about their product.  Some vendors employ people like me and Kevin Kline who can talk about not just SQL Server, but about their products too.

Document your attendee history. Take pictures of your monthly meetings and show butts in seats.  Salespeople get excited when they see pictures of lively attendees.

Work with the vendor’s available speakers. When Kevin and I can’t make it to a particular user group meeting, Quest usually suggests other Quest employees.  We’re not the only ones who work with SQL Server – in a company of 3,500, we have some really SQL-savvy people who do great presentations.  User groups often turn up their nose at these guys because they’re not “famous” – but they’re not famous because they have real jobs.  If you compromise and let some of the other folks speak, then those guys may bring a good report back to the mother ship.  I’ve heard Quest people say, “The ___ user group wants a speaker.  I spoke there a few months ago and they had really good turnout – we should send Kevin or Brent this time.”  It really does work.

Work with the vendor’s salespeople. Find out who your regional salesperson is, and find out what customers they’re working with.  Salespeople want to meet more customers, and if you run a local user group, you have something the salespeople want.  If I was a user group leader, I’d talk to the salesperson and say, “So, at the last user group meeting, we talked about how to do performance monitoring, and I noticed there were a couple of DBAs from a major financial firm that were asking a lot of questions.  I don’t feel comfortable telling you exactly who they were, but maybe you should do a presentation here about monitoring.  Is there anything I can do to help make that happen?”

I wish getting in-person speakers was easier, but in today’s economy, you’ve gotta give a little to get a little.  I want to cover as many user groups and SQLSaturday events as I can in 2010, but to do it, I’ve gotta minimize my travel and maximize the return for Quest.  Being educated about that will improve your odds of getting an in-person speaker.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 5th, 2010 at 8:02 AM and is filed under General Product Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.